…the Wakhan corridor, a narrow valley that juts out from the
main body of the country….. and acts as a buffer between Tajikistan, China and
Pakistan. It was the wildest, most remote and inaccessible part of Afghanistan.

….infamous Hindu Kush mountains – or the Hindu Killers – so named because of the vast
numbers of Indian slaves who died while being transported through them en route
to the Khanates of Central Asia, during the Middle Ages.

The old adage was true; the Afghans simply loved fighting
each other. But when foreign powers dare to invade, they have a habit of
putting their differences aside and ganging up to oust the invader. Most of
them weren’t, and still aren’t, particularly inspired by religious fanaticism,
but rather an innate sense of war, one that is in the blood after centuries of
violence.

….the Wakhan corridor….the reason that this remote strip of
land belongs to Afghanistan is that it provided a convenient buffer zone during
perhaps the most intriguing of all the political conflicts of recent times: the
Great Game.

‘The Afghans say that the Pamir is so high, even the birds
must cross on foot.’

The Wakhan is in fact the most impoverished region in
Afghanistan. Farming is virtually impossible because of the harsh climate and
there are no roads. All of the borders are closed and so trade is limited to
that which occasional merchants can smuggle over the high passes from Pakistan
or China – which isn’t much. As a result, there’s no need for currency and
people simple barter a yak for some sheep, or a guard dog for a rifle. There’s
just a few basic school houses…..and there are no clinics or medical
facilities. The Wakhan has the highest rate of infant mortality in the world – every
second child dies at birth; the average life expectancy is under forty.

…..the Irshad valley ….Malang ….laughed…. ‘They love a good
drink. We are Ismaili here. We’re not like those Sunni Muslims. We don’t do
Ramadan and look around – do you see any mosques?’

[Pakistan]…The
trucks were painted like Wedgwood china vases…..Pashtu tradition from
Peshawar…. ‘Isnt it unislamic to draw pictures of living beings?’ I asked,
wondering how the tribesmen of the North West Frontier, the wildest men in Asia
– supplier of recruits to the Taliban and supposed religious fanatics –
reconciled this art with their version of Islam.

‘They were drawing pictures much before Islam came. These
Pasthtuns have a very long history, and good art.’

Sost [Pakistan]….
Reminded me of one of those Wild West frontier towns… Inspite of the fact that
Ramadan had begun just a few days before nobody seemed to be paying the
slightest attention to it…. ‘I am Wakhi, you have seen how we live, we do Ramadan all year round, just
drinking salty tea and eating bread. We don’t need to fast any more to show we
are good people. And anyway I am Ismaili, and the Aga Khan has shown us that
these Sunni ideas are just stupid. Those Muslims in the south are bad people
and fasting won’t change that.’

….the majestic 7,800-metre white face of Rakaposhi, which
Wilfred Thesiger described as one of the finest mountains he’d ever seen….Here
the people were from the Burusho tribe among whom, like in Afghanistan, they
liked to claim descent from the soldiers of Alexander the Great. Their dialect
is unlike any other in the world, bearing no relation to the neighbouring
Pashtun, Urdu and Persian languages and has left anthropologists bewildered for
centuries.

….literacy rate for Pakistan…..average is sixty-three per cent…in
some tribal regions it’s only twenty per cent, and for women, ten……in the
Hunza….We have ninety-five per cent …..because we aren’t like those Sunni
barbarians….before we became Ismaili we were pretty savage ourselves. We prayed
to trees and rocks and birds and stuff like that……You know that we have the
longest lifespan in the world here….No processed food, we grow it all ourselves
and we drink clean water from the mountains….

….Nagar valley. If Hunza was spectacular, then the Nagar was
sublime… Gilgit lies just north of the confluence of the Gilgit and Indus
rivers, marking the exact convergence of the Hindu Kush, Karakoram and Western
Himalaya mountains…Some of the names of the villages, like Ganish and Gorikot,
indicated a Hindu heritage. Other signs clearly showed Buddhist influence. At
Kargah Nalah, a vast image of the living god is carved into a cliff-face, too
high for vandals to desecrate. It was chiseled in the seventh century, when the
whole of Gilgit-Baltistan was part of a greater Tibet, and later China. Muslim
rule cam much later…..

Gilgit bazaar was heaving with men. Pashtuns, Uighurs,
Punjabis and Shina tribals mixed freely…. The few women to be seen in the
streets were dressed in burkhas. Until now, the rural areas had seemed liberal
and welcoming. The influences of Ismaili Shia Islam had given the Hunza a
progressive and tolerant outlook, and I’d been surprised by the high levels of
education, spoken English and gender equality. But here in town there seemed to
be undertones of a stricter, less compromising culture going on. For the first
time on the journey, there were large mosques and almost everyone wore salwar
kameez…..the majority of men wore long beards, often with the upper lip shaved
– a sure sign of orthodoxy……I had noticed a tension in the air the moment we
crossed the Gilgit river; stares and squinting looks and no smiles. The people
weren’t hostile, just a lot less friendly than we’d become accustomed to
….Maybe we’d been spoilt by the hospitality of the Wakhi and Hunzakut.

It is only a one-day walk that separates the Karakorum from
the Himalayas, but those few miles heralded a new world – one that was less
harsh on the eyes, less craggy …But something sinister remained, both in the
nature and in the people that lived there.

Pilgrimages are an integral part of Indian culture. For
thousands of years Hindus and Buddhists have embarked on journeys to show their
devotion to God.

In many places I’d travelled, the concept of walking would
raise eyebrows and protests of disbelief. In Africa the locals would laugh at
me or ask if my car had broken down. ‘Only a poor man travels on foot,’ they’d
say. Or they would just shake their heads and tut and tell me that I must be
quite stupid…. In India it was different. Walking is so deeply ingrained in the
national psyche that nobody batted an eyelid. There was no question of my
motivations; of course I was on a pilgrimage. It didn’t matter which god I
worshipped, or where I was going – there was just a simple understanding that I
was a traveler. Nothing more, just another walker with my own mission, and that
was something to be respected.

We passed shrines to Shiva, Brahma and Vishnu…..We’d left
the Islamic world behind now, although there were still mosques in some of the
villages. We’d entered a new world where spirituality was more tangible, more
colourful and generally a bit more fun. ….Nothing was too bright or vulgar;
plastic and concrete were just as suitable a medium for the gods as wood and
stone.

…Umanga told us…. ‘If we see a tiger, best thing is, don’t
turn your back. If you turn your back, tiger will attack. They always come at
you from behind’ ….. ‘If a rhino is charging, you must climb a tree, but if we
see a bear, no climbing a tree. The bears can climb very easily. In this case,
you must stand your ground. The leopards are afraid of the humans, so they wont
come close. No worrying about the leopards.’

Apart from the Terai lowlands, the rest of the country is so
mountaineous that it is said that if you flattened out Nepal, like pulling on a
creased tablecloth, then the surface would amount to an area bigger than the
whole of the USA.

…the difference I encountered walking into Bhutan.

The Indian town of Jaigaoon ….was crowded, filthy and
noisy….Nobody bothered to clean the streets because the monkeys and the cows
would do it for them….Everyone, it seemed, thought it perfectly acceptable to
spit vile globules of phlegm onto the pavement….or to piss in the gutters in
broad daylight. The whole town stank of shit ….On the far side we emerged into
Phuentsholing and it was another world. There were no beggars or lepers. No car
horns – everything was eerily quiet. Signs everywhere indicated that smoking
cigarettes was illegal. So was ‘spitting on the walls’ …..Almost all the men
and women sported the traditional national dress……

Thimpu is a bizarre town. Despite being a capital city, its
barely worthy of the title of city; with a population of fewer than 80,000, you
can fit more people in Wembley football stadium. It must be one of the smallest
cities in the world and it doesn’t have a single traffic light. There’s only
one road in and out…..It was peculiarly quiet, except for the howling of a few
street dogs…People moved about shiftily, looking around as if they knew that
their happiness lay elsewhere – in the mountains and villages, and that life in
the miniature metropolis was an unnatural sin.

I found out that in fact high-altitude mountaineering was
illegal in Bhutan.

‘Its because we don’t have any rescue infrastructure
here….only one helicopter….It would be embarrassing to have a foreigner die in
our mountains, so we ban it.’

Behind the facade of modernity and development and
cleanliness there seemed to be a mystical, almost Shamanist undercurrent to
life in Bhutan. In spite of the image of a happy, pure nation there were hints
at a darker, more superstitious existence.

Even though I don’t believe in superstition, after so long
spent walking through this part of the world I knew never to underestimate the
power of spirituality and people’s beliefs. There seemed to be some things we
couldn’t just explain away. Call it God, fate, karma or magic……